that would be of interest to a disembodied 23-year-old out-of-towner. Of course, it was possible that a message that referred to an event during that timeframe had already been removed. So Munroe left a message in the forum asking any visitors whether they knew of such an event. He wasn’t optimistic — many of the visitors to the forum were one-time or infrequent visitors, but he couldn’t think what else to do. He also sent another message to AfterNet security to see if they could retrieve deleted messages, but he wasn’t hopeful about that, either.
Munroe spent the rest of the night and the early morning reading. He had discovered Project Gutenberg and right now was devouring Edgar Rice Burroughs. He’d remembered reading A Princess of Mars as a kid and now the idea of the ageless John Carter, fighting man of Virginia, delighted him.
About 9 a.m. Monday morning one of the detectives in missing persons came by and taped something on the side of Munroe’s terminal, with the note “Thought you’d find this funny.” It was a cartoon and was adapted from the old New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs at a computer and the caption, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This one showed the Grim Reaper, with the trademark sickle, sitting at a terminal and the caption, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not dead.”
Munroe stared at it awhile and just couldn’t find the humor. He knew what they were going for, but it just didn’t have the right — something. He also couldn’t figure out the detective’s motive for leaving the cartoon. Was it really just “thought you’d find this funny” or “we know you don’t really exist” or “we don’t think you should be taking a job from someone living”?
Whatever the motive, Munroe was now stuck with it until Yamaguchi was back. And should he even ask her to remove it? Would it brand him as someone without a sense of humor? — a death sentence, so to speak, among cops. At least they’d finally stopped stealing his chair. Maybe this was a form of acceptance from them. He’d never had any problems with Rollins, the detective who’d left the cartoon. Rollins was black after all; he should be sympathetic with the plight of another minority. Hmm, was that a bigoted assumption of mine?
Of course, the disembodied weren’t a minority. With hundreds of billions more dead than alive, some living viewed them as a real threat.
And Rollins might know that Munroe was there from the activity on the terminal’s screen, so should he respond now? Send an email to him? What should he say?
While living, this was a situation that Munroe had rarely encountered. He prided himself on being able to handle almost any situation — apart from ex-wives. He had been, after all, a white, male cop — lord of all he surveyed — although he liked to think he never let that sort of thinking affect his attitude or behavior. But now he found himself questioning his ability to act like a cop.
Well screw that, he thought. He opened up a new email window and sent a one-line message to Rollins: “Very droll.”
Let him figure that one out. Sometimes the ambiguity of email had its uses.
Munroe got out of the station before he had to deal with the consequences of his reply. He spent the morning at the same Starbucks and even got a few hellos from the crowd. This morning the table the terminal sat on also housed a few empty coffee cups — he didn’t know if this was an attempt by the baristas to make the table seem more homey or more likely just the attractive force between an open surface and an empty cup.
Munroe got into a chat with the others and found that two of them had been customers of this particular Starbucks while alive. And another person was still working as a consultant for the company she worked at while alive, just a block away, and she often used the store as her office.
Munroe had wondered at Starbucks’ financial incentive for installing the terminal, but the others online pointed out that aside from the initial investment for the terminal, it cost them almost nothing. And the consultant also mentioned that she had a meeting in an hour in the Starbucks, and her living coworkers certainly drank coffee.
The word “office” prompted Munroe to check his email and he saw that he had a reply from Rollins.
From: (Joshua Rollins)
[email protected]To:
[email protected]Subject: Missing disembodied report
Date: December 20 2004
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